Mina Loy

Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Löwy; 27 December 1882 – 25 September 1966) was a British-born artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Yvor Winters, among others. As stated by Nicholas Fox Weber in the New York Times, "This brave soul had the courage and wit to be original. Mina Loy may never be more than a vaguely familiar name, a passing satellite, but at least she sparkled from an orbit of her own choosing." Early life and education Loy was born in Hampstead, London. She was the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish tailor, Sigmund Felix Lowy, who had moved to London to evade persistent antisemitism in Budapest, and a Christian, English mother, Julia Bryan. Loy reflected on their relationship, and the production of her identity, in great detail in her mock-epic Anglo-Mongrels of the Rose (1923–1925). The marriage of Lowy and Bryan was fraught. Unknown to Loy, as biographer Carolyn Burke records, her mother married her father under the pressure of disgrace as she was already seven months pregnant with the child that would be Mina; this situation was mirrored later in Loy's life when she rushed into a marriage with Stephen Haweis after becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Lowy and Bryan had three daughters in total, with Mina being the oldest. As recorded extensively in both her poetry and writing, from Anglo-Mongrels of the Rose to late prose pieces, Loy describes her mother as overbearingly Evangelical Victorian. As Burke records: "Like most Evangelicals, for whom the imagination was a source of sin, Julia distrusted her child's ability to invent." In reference to her mother, Loy recalled that she was troubled by the fact of "the very author of my being, being author of my fear." Loy found it hard to identify with her mother, who not only punished her continually for her "sinfulness," but also espoused fervent support of the British Empire, rampant antisemitism (which included her husband), and nationalistic jingoism. Loy's formal art education began late in 1897 at St. John's Wood School where she remained for about two years. In retrospect, Loy called it "the worst art school in London" and "a haven of disappointment".